The Tragedy of Stokely Carmichael

Stokely Carmichael burst onto the U.S. political scene in June 1966 as the newly elected chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) when he led SNCC’s cry for “Black Power” during the Meredith March Against Fear through the Mississippi Delta. When the March entered Green-wood on June 16, police arrested Carmichael as the marchers tried to pitch their tents in a schoolyard. Quickly released on bail, an angry Carmichael told an evening rally: “This is the 27^th time I have been arrested—I ain’t going to jail no more.” Then, with his SNCC colleague Willie Ricks helping to prompt the crowd, “Five times Mr. Carmichael shouted, ‘We want black power!’ And each time the younger members of the audience shouted back, ‘Black power.’ ‘Every courthouse in Mississippi ought to be burned down to get rid of the dirt,’ Mr. Carmichael added as the audience applauded enthusiastically.”¹

An August 5, 1966, New York Times profile of Carmichael titled “Black Power Prophet” declared that “some have begun to describe him as a new Malcolm X,” the apostate Nation of Islam (NOI) firebrand whom NOI gunmen had murdered eighteen months earlier. Carmichael, who had just turned twenty-four, was an unlikely successor to Malcolm. Born in Trinidad, his family had moved to a virtually all-white section of the Bronx in 1952, and Carmichael attended the Bronx High School of Science. The spring of his senior year witnessed the burgeoning sit-in movement against segregated Southern lunch counters, but Carmichael was unimpressed. “Actually what I said,” he told the writer Robert Penn Warren four years later, “was ‘Niggers always looking to get themselves in the papers, no matter how they do it.’” As the sit-ins spread, Carmichael’s response remained jaundiced. “My reaction then was ‘Niggers are just like monkeys: one do, all do.’”² Two months later, however, in Washington, D.C., Carmichael happened to meet some participants and immediately joined them in a northern Virginia sit-in. “I was really impressed by the way they conducted themselves,” he told Warren.³

Carmichael’s serendipitous civil rights involvement led him to enroll at Howard University, though he confessed to Warren that he “didn’t want to go to an all-Negro school . . . and I wasn’t sure that Howard . . . could give me a good education.” In December of his freshman year, he traveled to Fayette County, Tennessee, where black citizens’ attempts to register to vote had met with intense economic retaliation by local whites. Carmichael was “very impressed with the people” and said “I thought this was way more important than a restaurant . . . the power to vote.”⁴

Six months later, Carmichael joined one of the Freedom Rides to Jackson, Mississippi, where the riders were arrested and sent to Parchman state prison. Carmichael served forty-nine days before being released, but he continued his studies at Howard and graduated in June 1964. That spring he told Warren that black separatism was “nonsense” and “no solution,” while dismissing the NOI as “full of beans.” One great danger for black leadership, Carmichael said, “is that you get an opportunist, and he becomes [a] rhetorician” who “says things” rather than striving to “really look for solutions. . . . I get very afraid if I read the name of one person over and over again, who’s saying nothing, essentially nothing, he’s got the press following him around, and he’s saying actually nothing.”⁵

In March 1965, when the Selma-to-Montgomery march was followed by the murder of a Northern white volunteer, Viola Liuzzo, in neighboring Lowndes County, Carmichael and several SNCC colleagues launched a new organizing effort there. One of the best recent civil rights histories, Hasan Kwame Jef-fries’ Bloody Lowndes: Civil Rights and Black Power in Alabama’s Black Belt (2009), narrates in vivid detail how Carmichael and his compatriots aided Lowndes’ small band of indigenous activists to build their group—the Lowndes County Christian Movement for Human Rights—into...